March 11th, 2014 by Mark Kidd

Panasas Releases PanFS 5.5 for ActiveStor NAS Appliances

Panasas today released PanFS 5.5, the architecture, filesystem, and operating system for its ActiveStor lineup of NAS appliances. PanFS 5.5 features improved support for Windows environments, including the replacement of open-source Samba components with a licensed Microsoft CIFS/SMB implementation to improve interoperability with Windows storage and application infrastructures.

PanFS combines a parallel file system with a single, scalable POSIX-compliant namespace, a volume manager, and a RAID engine. ActiveStor 14 solutions can scale above 8 petabytes, and according to Panasas can achieve up to 150GB/s or 1.4M IOPS of aggregate performance, and can be accessed by as many as 12,000 clients. ActiveStor 14 NAS storage solutions are based on 4U blade appliances. ActiveStor is fully journaled and distributed, and incorporates a globally coherent read/write cache.

Availability

The PanFS 5.5 storage operating system is now available for ActiveStor 11, 13, and 14 NAS appliances.